Wal‐mart, Leisure, and Culture

Carden, Art; Courtemanche, Charles

doi:10.1111/j.1465-7287.2009.00167.x

Cited by 17 publications

(7 citation statements)

References 17 publications

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“…This claim is inconsistent with the evidence, however. The thrust of the research agenda being pursued by McCloskey (2006, 2010) is to explain how and why virtue and prosperity are complements and self‐reinforcing inputs, and McCloskey's historical narrative receives some modern empirical support in the context of Wal‐Mart's effects on society (Carden et al ., 2009a, 2009b; Carden and Courtemanche, 2009; Courtemanche and Carden 2011).…”

Section: Robust (Liberal) Political Economy and The Shifting Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Critics claim that Wal‐Mart may be able to offer lower prices, but the consequences of doing so include the depression of workers' wages and benefits, reductions in social capital and the elimination of small businesses (among other things). After examining the relationship between the per capita number of Wal‐Mart stores and various leisure activities, Carden and Courtemanche (2009) found that Wal‐Mart entry corresponds to an increase in the participation in activities that utilise goods that can be bought at Wal‐Mart (such as playing tennis or golf). Some evidence was found of a decrease in participation for activities that are unrelated to Wal‐Mart; however, no decrease – and maybe an increase – in participation was found for some cultural activities (specifically visiting an art museum or classical music concert).…”

Section: Robust (Liberal) Political Economy and The Shifting Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%

“…The programme pursued by McCloskey and by Carden et al . (2009a, 2009b) and Carden and Courtemanche (2009) suggests that commerce is an input into the development of virtue rather than an input into the development of vice. Further, it also suggests that from the consumption perspective, wealth and virtue are complements rather than substitutes.…”

Section: Robust (Liberal) Political Economy and The Shifting Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%

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Capitalism, Socialism and Calculation

Butgereit

Carden

2011

Economic Affairs

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The merits and demerits of what we call 'capitalism' have been a source of much attention since Adam Smith wrote his seminal treatise on the salutary effects of free commerce and before. We consider the criticisms of the capitalist system as stated most prominently by Karl Marx, and we evaluate Marx's proposed solution to the evils of capitalism -specifically, socialism. We also explore the contributions of Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek to the debate about whether Marx's proposed alternative was really an alternative. Mises and Hayek provide powerful critiques of Marx's socialist vision by addressing the problem of economic calculation and the inability of central authorities to acquire knowledge diffused and distributed across an entire society. We question whether Marx offered a solution and then consider more recent attacks on capitalism and its alleged destruction of cultural capital. The theoretical contributions of Mises and Hayek are supported by recent empirical contributions suggesting that liberal political economy is robust.

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Section: Robust (Liberal) Political Economy and The Shifting Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Robust (Liberal) Political Economy and The Shifting Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Robust (Liberal) Political Economy and The Shifting Critiquementioning

confidence: 99%

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Capitalism, Socialism and Calculation

Butgereit

Carden

2011

Economic Affairs

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“…There is also a small but growing literature on the impact of Walmart on a variety of other outcomes outside of labor and housing markets. These include poverty rates (Goetz and Swaminathan, 2006), small business activity (Sobel and Dean, 2008), obesity (Courtemanche and Carden, 2011), social capital (Goetz and Rupasingha, 2006;Carden et al, 2009a), leisure activities (Carden and Courtemanche, 2009) and traditional values (Carden et al, 2009b).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

When Walmart Comes to Town: Always Low Housing Prices? Always?

Pope

2012

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Walmart often faces strong local opposition when trying to build a new store. Opponents often claim that Walmart lowers nearby housing prices. In this study we use over one million housing transactions located near 159 Walmarts that opened between 2000 and 2006 to test if the opening of a Walmart does indeed lower housing prices. Using a difference-in-differences specification, our estimates suggest that a new Walmart store actually increases housing prices by between 2 and 3 percent for houses located within 0.5 miles of the store and by 1 to 2 percent for houses located between 0.5 and 1 mile. IntroductionOne of the most significant changes over the past two decades in the U.S. retail market is the expansion of large box stores and supercenters. Walmart is the largest of these rapidly growing retailers and is currently the biggest private employer in the world.In the United States alone, Walmart currently operates more than 4,400 retail facilities and employs almost 1.4 million people. 1 Phone surveys suggest that 84% of households in the U.S. shop at Walmart in a given year with 42% of households reporting to be regular Walmart shoppers (Pew Research Center, 2005 period. In contrast to the county-level analyses conducted by most previous work on the impacts of Walmart, the micro-level nature of our dataset allows us to develop an identification strategy that can help us to overcome the potential endogeneity of the location and timing of Walmart openings. More specifically, we employ a difference-indifferences analysis that compares housing prices before and after a Walmart opens for areas very close to a newly built Walmart, to areas slightly farther away.The results from this analysis suggest that a new Walmart store increases nearby housing prices. Our primary analysis suggests that houses located within 0.5 miles of the store see increases in their prices of about 2-3 percent when comparing the two and a half years before the Walmart opened to the two and a half years after the opening. Houses between 0.5 and 1 mile from the Walmart see an increase of 1-2 percent. It does not 4 appear that these price impacts are caused by an abrupt increase in the number of houses that sold in the area or by a change in the composition of houses that sold. Furthermore, graphical evidence and falsification tests provide no evidence of a spurious, positive effect due to differential housing price growth at the Walmart location and are therefore supportive of a causal interpretation of our difference-in-differences estimates of the impact of Walmart on housing prices.The paper proceeds as follows. In section 2 we discuss the potential impacts of Walmart in terms of the value of accessibility and the costs of negative externalities. We proceed in section 3 to describe the key datasets used in our analysis. In section 4, we describe our empirical strategy for estimating the impact of Walmart on housing prices and in section 5, we present the results. Finally, we conclude in section 6. Accessibility and Externality Ef...

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“…Motivated by this trend toward nontraditional retail outlets, a growing body of research examines the effects of Walmart on a number of outcomes, including prices (Basker 2005b;Basker and Noel 2009;Volpe and Lavoie 2007;Leibtag 2007, 2009), labor market outcomes (Basker 2005a;Hicks 2007;Neumark et al 2008;Dube et al 2007;Basker 2006), poverty (Goetz and Swaminathan 2006), small business activity (Sobel and Dean 2008), social capital (Goetz and Rupasingha 2006;Carden et al 2009a), leisure activities (Carden and Courtemanche 2009), traditional values (Carden et al 2009b), and obesity (Courtemanche and Carden 2011). 4 However, to our knowledge no previous research has used nationwide data to explore the effects of other big box chains.…”

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confidence: 99%